News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Who cares about the Ivy League? by dralley on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @11:23AM (#36601688)
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einsteins brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould.
Re:Who cares about the Ivy League? by nearbuy on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @11:40AM (#36601973)
Srinivasa Ramanujan would be a counterexample. He grew up poor with no formal training in mathematics but was nonetheless one of the world's greatest math geniuses.
Re:Who cares about the Ivy League? by bluepod4 on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:15PM (#36602573)
I think you mean “exception to the rule” and not “counterexample”. Different meanings.
Re:Who cares about the Ivy League? by zehaeva on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:16PM (#36602589)
He certainly was brilliant. But compared to his contemporaries he died really young, at age 32.

He did also go to school and even tried to go to college, he even got a scholarship! He had a lot of issues with the non math coursework however and did not finish any degree that I am aware of.

The reality of his life is a bit more complex than "oh a poor boy found a basic math text book and taught himself to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history"

What is more interesting here is to imagine if he grew up with wealth and formal training, would he have died at 32? Would he been given the time and resources to actually become one of the greatest math geniuses out there?

Ramanujan had a lot of raw talent, but it wasn't honed, and ultimately it was cut extremely short and wasted.

Re:Who cares about the Ivy League? by nearbuy on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @12:49PM (#36603113)
What Ramanujan's potential could have been is a different question than whether Einstein's equals are dying undiscovered in cotton fields.

By definition, we know of zero examples of geniuses who were never discovered due to poverty, which makes it hard to extrapolate the rate at which this happens. But we do have examples of geniuses who grew up poor but were discovered nonetheless, which gives us hope that exceptional people in similar situations will be discovered. Especially today with global primary school enrollment rates close to 90% [1], and secondary school rates around 76%.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.NENR